Andrew Golis

My title isn’t meant to imply that the election IS lost, but if Kerry does lose, one of the things they’re going to talk about is the news cycles of the last 4 days.

Here’s what happened. Wednesday night, Kerry beat Bush (fairly soundly according to many snap polls of undecided voters) in the last debate. According to media consensus (and what a ridiculous, silly and unfortunately important thing that is), Kerry had beaten Bush badly in the first debate, and maybe won, maybe tied in the second. So Kerry left the series of debates with a fairly overwhelming victory over the President of the United States.

However, on Wednesday night and Thursday morning, the newspapers were mostly neutral, as they tend to be the day after. They try not to immediately decide the winner, but wait for polling and consensus. The day after the first debate most seemed to hint at the fact that Kerry won, but it wasn’t until the second day after the debate that consensus had solidified and media folk felt comfortable declaring the winner. Now, this little process in and of itself is fairly ridiculous, but that’s how it’s happened.

So, Kerry came out of Wednesday night with a win. Thursday morning articles were neutral, with many opinions giving Kerry the win but not enough time for that to solidify and become fact. On Thursday (and even late Wednesday night in the spin room), the Republicans began a particularly potent attack meant to create a dominant story that would supersede the Kerry victor story for the Friday cycle and throughout the weekend.

That story was the Mary Cheney outrage. Personally, I think it was a bit silly of Kerry to do, and I can understand a little “eh, c’mon man, leave her out of it.” The Republicans, however, were successful at making it more than just a “meh, that was weird.” They made it a mini-scandal. It was the top story for the campaign on all of the Sunday shows today. It’s received tons of media attention.

That is nothing short of political genius. On the first Sunday after John Kerry, the man challenging the sitting wartime President of the United States, won his third debate in a row, the story was about something else! Pundits were talking about different polls that were done that expressed common sentiment on the Mary Cheney issue, surrogates for the BC04 and KE04 campaigns were debating this more than anything else.

And that’s how Kerry may have lost the election. If the story for the last three days had been about how he spanked the President around for a week and a half, about how we saw a different President in each debate (scowly, yelly and chipper), Kerry probably would have received a couple of point bounce, and stories coming into this next week would have been about his growing momentum. Instead, as the Mary Cheney issue goes away, stories will be about how the campaign is still neck and neck, with neither candidate having momentum over the other (or different people having different claims, but no media consensus). No one will remember what happened in the debates.

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